Tag Archives: History of Medicine

Outmoded Midwives?

Gender wars of the medical kind for this week’s #SalemSuffrageSaturday post, although I am uncertain of how much of a battle was waged here in Salem. Commencing in the seventeenth century with the efforts of the emigre Chamberlen brothers, armed with their supposed expertise and trade/family secret forceps, male physicians began to move into the lucrative practice of midwifery and consequently push women practitioners out in England. London’s midwives, licensed (first by the Church and later by the Royal College of Physicians), well-established and -esteemed, fought back with petitions, asserting that Neither can Dr Chamberlane teach the art of midwifery in most births because he hath no experience in itt but by reading and it must bee continuall practise in this kind that will bringe experience, and those women that desire to learn must be present at the deliv’y of many women and see the worke and behavious of such as be skilfull midwifes who will shew and direct them and resolve their doubts. These sentiments were expressed more fully in the first book about midwifery written by an English woman, Jane Sharp’s Midwives Book: or The Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered, first published in 1671 and in print until 1725.

Gonville and Caius Library, Cambridge University.

The encroachment of male physicians on an endeavor that had always been confined to women continued and accelerated in England over the eighteenth century, as an “obstetrics revolution” unfolded, but midwives continued to defend their territory with both pen and practice, and satirical artists joined the fray, with images of fumbling and grabbing doctors in wide circulation. The most arresting one by far was Isaac Cruikshank’s Man-Midwife (1793), a strange beast indeed. By the end of the century, midwives had lost about half of their market, as the wealthy and fashionable demanded the services—not quite so suspect as a century before—of educated physicians.

British Museum

The same scenario seems to have played itself out on this side of the Atlantic, although over a more constricted time period and with less organized opposition by American midwives, who did not have the numbers and public presence of their English counterparts. Midwives were very clearly held in high esteem in the new world as well: the adjectives used in their newspaper obituaries (after the hundreds and in some cases thousands of births they facilitated were noted) were: “godly”, “skillful”, “excellent” and “expert”. It is clear that their communities revered them. According to my survey of Boston and Salem newspapers, however, their advertisements get fewer and fewer after the Revolution and then suddenly, around 1795, the man-midwives arrive. That very year, as Mrs. Mary Wardilloe died in the charity hospital, Alexander Hunt, physician, surgeon and man-midwife (always a triple threat) set up shop in Salem.

Wellcome Library +Salem Gazette

After the turn of the nineteenth century, there are few references to professional midwives in the Salem papers, with the exception of death notices. In an effort to revive and professionalize the practice, Dr. Samuel Gregory founded the Boston Female Medical School to train midwives in 1848. Gregory’s motivations seem more moral than feminist, echoing the opinions raised in London a century before in his 1848 tract Man-Midwifery: Exposed and Corrected: “the employment of men in midwifery practice is always grossly indelicate, often immoral, and always constitutes a serious temptation to immorality.” The school was later assimilated into the Boston University School of Medicine, as midwifery was sidelined by the development of obstetrics, the emergence of nursing as a medical career choice for women, and the removal of childbirth from the home to the hospital.

The medical establishment of Boston, represented by The Boston Medical Journal, responded to Dr. Gregory with an opinion that “the transfer of the responsibilities of the lying-in chamber from the midwife to the educated accoucheur, resulted in a diminution of the mortality incident to childbirth, in the course of half a century, to half the former—and that physicians are more moral than clergymen.” Boston Post, April 4, 1856.

Appendix: yes, I have written this post about London and Salem midwives without mentioning witchcraft, because that connection is largely mythical. There’s an excellent discussion of how the connection was created at Dig: A History Podcast: “Doctor, Healer, Midwife, Witch: How the Women’s Health Movement Created the Myth of the Midwife-Witch”.


A Revolutionary Apothecary in Salem

Most of the students in my summer Research & Writing Seminar are pursuing local history topics related to the Revolutionary War and just after: conscription, taxation, the disruption to business, the involvement of African-Americans, Tories. This bunch seems to be drawn to that era like moths to a flame, and with the lack of local resources, we have had to be resourceful. Fortunately we have some good databases at Salem State, they are bound for repositories in Boston and elsewhere, and we’ve all enjoyed the wonderful Annotated Newspapers of Harbottle Dorr, Jr. site at the Massachusetts Historical Society. But once again, this foraging illustrates how hurtful the withdrawal of the Salem sources in the Phillips Library has been to our local academic and educational community. Supposedly the Library in Rowley will be open next week, and perhaps professional historians will journey up to explore its resources, but I fear it will remain inaccessible to most of my students. The lack of digitization still rankles, especially when compared to the wonderful Dorr site. I promised I wouldn’t post on PEM and the Phillips until we had some course-changing event, but obviously I can’t help myself. Still, enough: let’s move on to more responsible repositories.

Take care if you delve into the MHS’s Dorr database: hours will be devoured. The combination of Dorr’s own annotations and the quality and navigability of the images is addictive. My students are drawn to the news, the opinion, and the “big” topics, but I love the advertisements towards the end of the papers. If I were in their place, I think I’d write my paper on the Salem apothecary Jonathan Waldo, whose conspicuous advertisements crowd out everything for me, even the imminent war.

Waldo 1

Assize of Bread

Waldo 2The Essex Gazette of April 18, 1775, via the Annotated Newspapers of Harbottle Dorr, Jr. at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Jonathan Waldo (1756-1817) was a major Salem apothecary in the later 18th century, at one time in partnership with William Stearns and later on his own. His particular business mandated a large quantity of imports among his stock, as most British patent medicines were just that: British patent medicines. In the next (April 25) edition of the Essex Gazette, Waldo advertised goods imported in the last Ships from London: was that it for his business?

Waldo 8

Apparently not. Nearly all of his account books are in the Phillips Library, of course, but fortunately a classic secondary text, George Griffenhagen’s and James Harvey Young’s Old English Patent Medicines in America (1959) mined them to establish that Waldo’s business survived through the Revolution through a dual strategy of continuing to import apparently-contraband British medicine and concocting his own American substitutions. Waldo’s business endured even as he served as a Major of the Salem Militia during the Revolution and the major administrator of the restoration of the renamed Fort Pickering (previously Fort William) on Winter Island after. His post-revolutionary account book, digitized by Harvard University for its Countway Library of Medicine, confirms his thriving—and diversified—business. Indeed, the Revolution seems to have inspired “innovation” and reaped more profits for Waldo, who notes that the popular British elixir Turlington’s Balsam of Life was very dear even after the war was over, but “his own” recipe was increasingly popular with his customers due to its lower price.

Waldo Harvard

Waldo collage

Waldo Turlington's Balsam textWaldo, Jonathan, 1756-1817. Account book of Jonathan Waldo, 1788-1794 (inclusive). B MS b265.1, Countway Library of Medicine; Waldo managed to import a large supply of the popular Female Pills by Dr. John Hooper from London in 1777–along with a supply of Turlington’s Balsam of Life, Duke Digital Repository, History of Medicine Collections.


%d bloggers like this: